In a 2017 Rolling Stone interview, Elon Musk cried while describing his father. “He was such a terrible human being,” he said. “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done.”¹ His staff confirmed they’d never seen him cry before. He could have been describing himself.
Donald Trump’s father had one lesson: be a killer. Anything less was weakness.² His eldest son Fred Jr. became a pilot instead. Fred Sr. called him “a bus driver in the sky” and systematically dismantled him until he died of alcoholism at 42.² Donald watched. Donald learned the wrong lesson.
None of this excuses anything. Musk and Trump are racist billionaires burning down the world for their own benefit, and they bear full responsibility for every choice they make. But monsters are made.
There is a science to this. A 2015 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tracked 565 children and found that narcissism develops when parents treat children as inherently superior.³ But the opposite pathway also works. Insufficient early gratification leaves children with what psychologist Phebe Cramer called “a sense of neediness and an expectation that others will not naturally be responsive.”⁴ A 2016 study of 674 families found that parental hostility at age 12 predicted exploitative behavior at age 14.⁵ This indicates that parenting shapes the maladaptive components of narcissism more than the adaptive ones.
Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography quotes Musk’s sister Tosca describing their father’s lectures, which lasted hours. “Calling you worthless, pathetic, making scarring and evil comments.”⁶ When Elon was hospitalized after a beating at school, his father Errol took the side of the attacker.⁶ What a lesson to teach your son.
Musk’s ex-partner Grimes told Isaacson something specific: Musk “associates love with being mean or abusive.”⁶
In the same Rolling Stone interview, Musk said: “If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy. Going to sleep alone kills me.” And: “When I was a child, there’s one thing I said: I never want to be alone.”¹ In 2018, he told the New York Times he’d spent his birthday at the Tesla factory. All night. No friends. Nothing. He alternated between laughter and tears during the interview.⁷ In 2024, he told Don Lemon about “a negative chemical state in my brain, like depression.”⁸ At the 2023 DealBook Summit, he revealed he’d contemplated suicide as early as age 12.⁹ In 2022, he said: “I am not afraid of dying. I think it would come as a relief.”¹⁰
Musk is worth more than most nations. He has rockets, car companies, and a social media platform. He does not have peace. If he could find it, maybe he’d buy an island and disappear. Maybe he’d feed the hungry or cure a disease. But he cannot find it. So instead he burns down the world looking.
God forbid he lift anyone else up. When you were trained to believe you were worth nothing, you can only try to put others below you. Trump’s daddy taught him the same lesson.
Mary Trump is Donald’s niece and a clinical psychologist. In 2020, she published her account of the family where she described Fred Sr. as a “high-functioning sociopath” whose core belief was that in life, there can only be one winner and everybody else is a loser, and kindness is weakness.² Her assessment of Donald: an “insatiable black hole of need” created by childhood emotional deprivation.² He was trained to hunger endlessly for daddy’s approval. He has never been loved, and on some level, he knows it.
Researchers Morf and Rhodewalt identified the paradox in 2001: narcissists build a grandiose self, but they cannot get genuine positive feedback because they cannot genuinely connect.¹¹ The wound cannot be healed by the success it generates. Trump has never stopped complaining. Academic analysis in the Quarterly Journal of Speech called it “the rhetoric of ressentiment,” noting that his animosity can never be satisfied.¹² He said no president had ever been treated worse.¹³
At least Frankenstein’s monster had the decency to walk into the Arctic. Musk and Trump walked into the White House. The worst of us have become the wealthiest and most powerful. Psychologists call it the dark triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.¹⁴ In a poor person, these traits lead to prison. In a rich person, they lead to the Forbes list and the Oval Office. Our system does not accidentally elevate men like this. It rewards them. This is not the millionth psychological profile of Trump and Musk. The goal is not to return to 2023 or 2015. The system that created them has to be dismantled and rebuilt.
Every adult is responsible for what they do with their pain. These men will never have enough money or power to fill what their fathers hollowed out of them. That means they will never stop taking. A system that lets wounded men amass this much power while paying almost nothing back is a system designed to be looted by people exactly like them. If we want to stop the bleeding, we start by closing the wound. Tax the rich. Not because it will fix Musk and Trump. Clinically speaking, nothing is likely to. But because it limits how much damage they can do while they spend the rest of their lives trying to feel whole.
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A note on numbers: Musk’s wealth exceeds the annual GDP of roughly 150 countries.¹⁵ That number is actually conservative; some estimates put it closer to 160. There is a methodological caveat worth noting: comparing net worth to GDP is not a perfect comparison. Net worth is total accumulated assets at a point in time. GDP is annual economic output. By national wealth rather than annual production, Musk has more money than 80 countries.
Tesla paid zero federal income tax in 2024 despite $2.3 billion in income. Over the past three years, the company reported $10.8 billion in U.S. income and paid $48 million in federal taxes. That is a rate of 0.4 percent.¹⁶ The bottom half of American taxpayers pay 3.5 percent.¹⁷ A single mother working two jobs pays more of her income in taxes than the richest man on Earth.
Fuck this guy.
We live in a country where Epstein’s best friend is president and the richest man on Earth shares 20 year old FourChan memes. Both commit fraud, theft, and scores of other crimes daily without consequence. It feels like nothing will ever change. But systems that protect the powerful only survive as long as the rest of us let them. If we want a fair world, we have to build it. That takes recruitment. The way religious people evangelize for their church, we need to evangelize for justice. Educate the people around you. Knock on doors. Bring them in. Building solidarity is all we’ve got. Rich and powerful people will not save the rest of us. The only power we will gain is the power we take, not the power we ask politely for.
Call your state legislators and governor. Tell them to tax the rich, close loopholes, and stop giving profitable corporations our tax dollars. Tell them companies that donate to political campaigns or PACs should not receive tax breaks or subsidies. If they have enough money to buy elections, they can pay their damn bills.
If you want to understand how we got here and what to do about it, the following are available as free PDFs: Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder, The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare, Introduction to Soft Secession, and Grab Them by the EARR: Educate, Activate, Recruit, Repeat.
Just click anywhere on this sentence for the free booklets and books.